Cudjoe Lewis—born Oluale Kossola around 1841 in Bantè, in the kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin)—stands as a powerful witness to two intertwined histories: the rich traditions of the Yoruba people of West Africa and the enduring scars of the transatlantic slave trade. Remembered as the last known survivor of the Clotilda, the final recorded slave ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States, Lewis’s life illuminates both the brutality of enslavement and the resilience of African culture in the Americas.

Early Life and Capture

Kossola was born into the Yoruba ethnic group, whose communities at the time were part of the sophisticated Oyo cultural sphere. His youth was shaped by the rhythms of Yoruba village life until circa 1860, when soldiers of the kingdom of Dahomey—under King Ghezo—conducted one of their frequent slave-raiding expeditions. During this raid Kossola and hundreds of others were seized and marched to the coastal slave port of Ouidah, a key hub in the transatlantic slave trade.

Although the United States had banned the international slave trade in 1808, American slave traders still financed clandestine voyages. In Ouidah, Kossola was sold to American traffickers and forced aboard the schooner Clotilda, along with roughly 110 other captives.

The Illegal Voyage of the Clotilda

The Clotilda’s voyage was organized in secret by Timothy Meaher, a wealthy shipper from Mobile, Alabama, who aimed to defy federal law and profit from human trafficking. In mid-1860 the Clotilda crossed the Atlantic and slipped into Mobile Bay. To destroy evidence of their crime, the crew burned and sank the ship in the Mobile–Tensaw Delta—its remains would not be positively identified until 2019, when maritime archaeologists confirmed the wreck.

Enslavement and Emancipation

On arrival, Kossola was renamed Cudjoe Lewis, a common practice meant to erase African identity. He was enslaved on Alabama plantations until the end of the American Civil War in 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment formally ended slavery. Freedom, however, brought daunting challenges: Lewis and his fellow Clotilda survivors had to build livelihoods in a society still marked by racism and economic exclusion.

Founding of Africatown

Determined to preserve their heritage, about thirty Clotilda survivors—including Lewis—pooled their resources and purchased land in 1870 from the Meaher family itself, the very family that had financed their illegal capture. They established a settlement they called Africatown (also known as Africa Town) on the outskirts of Mobile.

The founders organized their community using social and political traditions from their West African homelands, maintained Yoruba and other African languages for decades, and celebrated their ancestral customs. Lewis emerged as a respected elder and community leader, helping to keep the group’s cultural memory alive.

Later Life and Zora Neale Hurston’s Interviews

In the early twentieth century, Lewis shared his memories with journalists, historians, and notably with Zora Neale Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance writer and anthropologist. Hurston interviewed him in the late 1920s, capturing his vivid recollections of capture, the Middle Passage, and the founding of Africatown. Publishers of the time rejected the manuscript for its unflinching portrayal of slavery; it remained unpublished until 2018, when it appeared as Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”.
Lewis died on July 26, 1935, in Africatown, by then recognized as the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade.

Legacy and Historical Significance

Cudjoe Lewis’s life underscores the persistence of the illegal slave trade more than fifty years after it was outlawed in the United States. His testimony preserves an authentic African perspective on capture, enslavement, and cultural survival. Africatown—today a U.S. National Register of Historic Places site—remains a living symbol of resilience, where descendants and preservationists continue to honor the memory of Lewis and his fellow founders.

The 2019 confirmation of the Clotilda wreck renewed international attention to Africatown’s history and to the broader story of the Atlantic slave trade’s last chapter. Lewis’s journey—from Yoruba village child to elder of an African American community—remains a powerful narrative of endurance, identity, and the unbreakable ties between Africa and its diaspora.

Sources
Hurston, Zora Neale. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” Amistad, 2018.

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